Freestyle musings from a pseudo-intellectual hellcat in high heels with Huxtable aspirations in a ghetto fab world. Proudly sponsored by bouts of bitchy mood swings, one too many swigs of Turning Leaf, the letters F & U and the madness that is the Rotten Apple.

Imagine Roger Clemens & Mike Piazza agreeing to share the next cover of Sports Illustrated together. Shaq & Kobe shooting the breeze on the 16th tee. John Kerry and Dumbya bonding over cucumber sandwiches and afternoon tea. Me marrying a Boston Red Sox fan. (I shudder at the thought). After fueling the kind of verbal warfare unseen since the days of KRS vs. Shan, the Hatfields & McCoys of hip-hop — Jay-Z and Nas have traded in beef cooked well done for a serving of split-peace soup with the signing of God's Son to Def Jam. Jigga what? Jigga who?

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - When Nas' first album under his new Def Jam Recordings pact is released later this year, it will mark the latest chapter in his truce with fellow rapper Jay-Z, the label's president.

Nas' jump to Def Jam after an 11-year tenure at Columbia comes on the heels of the rap icons' headline-making, onstage lovefest last October during R&B/hip-hop WWPR New York's Power House concert.

The two had battled over who would wear the New York rap crown following the 1997 death of the Notorious B.I.G. The feud kicked into high gear in 2001 when Nas' fiery "Ether" countered Jay-Z's teasing "The Takeover."

It would be really easy to take the bandwagoneer route and chalk this up as the white flag for Nasir since he's now wound up on the label run by the man who spent the better part of 2002-on throwing dirt on his relevance and splashed off in his child's mother for extra salt in the wound. With Mobb Deep relegated to being G-Unit's newest cheerleaders and the artist formerly known as Esco under the IDJMG umbrella, finding a Queensbridge MC with a set of balls still attached is a more difficult undertaking than the search for the Holy Grail.

But I digress...that's a lot of residual disappointment talking there. In the bigger picture, I'm glad to see that maturity still has a place in rap and these two grew up enough to put the past behind them and forge ahead without the script ending in gunfire.